Loren orsillo (Sa) - Trophy hunting

FRONT Gallery: 3rd - 19TH october 2019

These are the spoils of the suburban hunt. The civilised trophies of conquest. 

Homogenising the visual dialect of painting with that of found objects, ‘Trophy Hunting’ highlights the anecdotal capacity of the mundane artefact, whilst simultaneously investigating the inconsistency that arises with the territory of interpretation. With roots embedded in modernist painting, Arte Povera and the Readymade, these works attempt to decipher a contemporary climate of capitalist abundance and the manmade jungle of objects that has flourished in our daily peripherals. Objects sourced from street, second-hand store and supermarket alike are fused with paint, canvas and stretcher to fracture and recontextualise the narratives intrinsic to the materials. The nostalgic objects littered throughout this body of work act as wildcards of meaning; their interpretation subject to change under the scrutiny of each new viewer. 

Riddled with sarcasm and sincerity in equal dosage, these paintings occupy the gallery walls like proud hunting trophies poached from an abundant artificial habitat. However, unlike the dormant, glassy-eyed deer head, the ambiguity of these paintings spares them from such a passive fate. Instead, they snicker and leer back at the hunter; reminders of the lack of mastery or understanding we humans have over our lived spaces.